July 2010

07/29/2010

07/25/2010

You stand shoulder to shoulder at the mouth of the Kenai River, where the fresh water joins the salt of the Pacific, holding a net big enough to catch your six-year-old son. You wait alongside hundreds of other Alaska residents for a 6 to 10 pound red salmon to swim into your net. Not the net inches from yours. Not the net at the front of the line. But yours. You silently talk to the fish. Please, you say, please find my net amidst the rest.

And they do.

You catch your first Red within minutes of putting your net in the water on your first day at the beach. Your daughter sleeps in her car-seat in the tent, your son is still with his grandparents driving down, and so you have a rare opportunity to join your husband in the water, to hold your net alongside his-- and before you can even talk about the weather, you feel a salmon hit and turn your net over as he jumps out of the water in an attempt to flee. You drag the net along the rocks underneath your feet and walk back towards the beach. Thank you, you tell the salmon, before raising the small wooden dowel and bonking it on the head.

You are not as traumatized as you were two years ago, the last time your family joined friends to camp on the beach and work for salmon. You feel more comfortable taking the life of this fish, it still makes your heart pump, your adrenaline rise, but you want to do it again-- unlike last time, when you let the next three fish that hit your net escape, by all too hesitantly turning it over, not wanting to bring another rock down on a fish's small head.

This time you understand. You know why your husband dreams about fishing during the dark February days. You get the excitement. You want to feel another fish hit your net. You want to drag him to shore, to claim him on your permit that allows 55 fish for a family of four. You kill with reverence, thankful for the bounty of meals these silver-speckled salmon deliver. Kenai Reds, wild Alaska salmon, who can ask for a better meal?

And in this day of microwave dinners and take out meals there is something almost sacred about fishing for food, about catching your own lunch, and honoring its life before slitting its gills. It is the feeling of honest to goodness work that doesn't involve fax machines or email or processes and systems you can't feel or taste. It is the feeling of sore calves from standing on tip toes to be even with the men, and jumping the waves so the water doesn't go down into your waders. Sore arms and back from holding the large net against the currents and tides, from lugging the salmon ashore. And this sacred feeling is heightened when it is a communal act, a unique Alaskan ritual each July, during which you have the opportunity to fill your freezers with salmon fillets, salmon burgers, and ground and smoked salmon for the long winter months ahead.

This year you hit a good run. Over 80,000 red salmon swam through on one of your days at the beach. This is how you can stand alongside another Alaskan, your shoulders almost touching, with hundreds of other residents lining the beach, and still catch fish. Amazing, really.

(Audrey is pictured here catching one of many.)

You caught one when you and the small Asian woman next to you started to pull your nets out of the water to untangle them. You felt it hit as you walked back towards the beach. You weren't sure at first if the salmon was in hers or yours and smiled when you saw the nine pound fish fighting against the trap of your net.

You caught one with your seven-year-old buddy Lila. Standing at the edge, with only a third of your net in the water, you were about to say: Lila, I think I need to go out farther now, when a salmon jumped right out of the water in front of you. Lila screamed and ran away until her Dad reminded her she had to help pull the net in, and then she beamed as she grabbed the "bonker" and hit him on the head. Her first fish. Oh, so proud.

Your favorite catch came after a long slow spell, as you stood in the not quite 50 degree water with your layers of fleece and gortex trying not think about the cold, shielding your face from the wind, watching your numb hands grip the net. You looked up in time to see the back of a fish as it swam near the surface towards the group of people you stood near. It jumped, slapped a man two over from you in the face with it's tail, and then landed in your net. You all laughed as you pulled that fresh fish to shore.

The camaraderie of standing in the water with others makes the frigid temperatures more bearable. That and the persistent hope that any second a fish will hit. And once it does, no matter how cold you are, or if you had just been ready to take a break, you find yourself wading out again. One more, you think, one more.

During this trip, you survived torrential rain and a wind that whipped off the waves and blew that walls of your cook tarp free. This while camped on the beach with a seven-month baby and a boy who walks with canes. A boy whose job became delivering the "bonker" to the person with a fish in his or her net. "When I'm bigger I can go out there," he said, as he stood at the water's edge with his rain boots and Carhartt overalls.

And you know you will find a way for him to participate, because his determination over rides his disabilities every time. And you know you will be here again next summer and the summer after that and as long as the salmon are plentiful and subsistence is possible because its about more than camping and fishing but about reconnecting with natural processes and systems you can feel and taste.

You woke on Wednesday to blue skies and ended the full day of fishing and parenting with a campfire underneath a low-riding moon. Your coolers full of salmon, your children asleep, you sat next to your husband, grabbed his hand in yours, and silently thanked your own version of god for this rich salty life of yours.

07/16/2010

07/14/2010

What I failed to mention in my last two posts about Elias's public tantrums, is that on both days we'd revisited his birth story hours before he later melted down.

The morning before our failed evening visit with our gracious neighbors Elias and I had looked at pictures of him when he weighed less than two pounds and survived on a respirator in an isollette at the Providence NICU.

The next day we visited the NICU, on his request, and our friend who is one of the social workers there showed him where they store the isollettes so he could see the "glass box" that kept him warm.

And maybe its the counselor in me wanting to read too much into his behavior, but I feel as though he is beginning to understand that he is "different", that his body doesn't work as well as others. We've noticed a recent spike in questions about his birth, the NICU, and his subsequent surgeries that correlates with Olive beginning to crawl.

(Yes, she's crawling now on all fours)

Along with these questions--"Was Olive in the NICU?" "Was I sick when I was born?" "Did you want to hold me all the time?"--we've seen an angry mean side of Elias that never appears during the discussions but later when it's time to leave the dog park or go to bed or change a diaper.

"No!!!' he cries as he scowls and reaches his hands out to push or squeeze. Emotionally he is more of a three-year-old than a six-year old, and I know that children need to push boundaries to learn where we end and they begin, so part of me just sees this as a delayed developmental phase.

(Even if he has the vocabulary of a six-year-old and the ripped upper body and strong hands of a boy who uses his arms to walk.)

And yet I worry that his emotions go deeper than not wanting to stop playing, that he is beginning to create a picture of himself, with holes, that he is beginning to understand the disparity between a body that moves with ease and his own.

Why did Olive stay safe in my womb for 40 weeks and not Elias?

He's not asking this question yet but I need to prepare to answer it, even if I still stumble to explain.

Even to myself.

How is it that I happened to be born with two uteri instead of one?

And two cervixes.

One that failed to stay closed and one that failed to open. Listen to my language here.

Failed.

As if I sold out on my son because he just happened to end up in the womb with the "incompetent" door. And I know I'm hard on myself, wanting to heave all the blame onto my shoulders and carry it around with a big "kick me" sign on my back-- but I also know that this doesn't help Elias make sense of his story.

The whole "whoa is me" thing has got to move out of the way so he can go through his own process of grief and acceptance.

It's his story after all.

I was thinking recently about the fact that Elias actually died at birth. In another hospital, one that didn't believe in resuscitating a 24-weeker, he wouldn't be here today, standing on a stool at our kitchen sink, washing out a Prego bottle, saying, "Look Mom, I made orange water!"

And maybe this needs to be part of his story. The fact that he came back. That he's here.

And sure, the doctors and equipment saved him at first, but his will to
live, his strength, his soul, that's what brought him home, and what
continues to push him forward...

07/11/2010

Before Elias's public melt-down at the dog park, before he screamed and twisted in my arms, before he squeezed my neck and hit me in the head, before I dropped him on the ground and he ran away crying, "I don't want to go home never ever...", we played on the shore of University Lake, taking turns throwing tennis balls out in the water for Tonsina.

Elias stood on the small rocky beach with one cane supporting his body as he bounced and waved and rocked with glee. He cocked his free arm back and tossed his tennis ball out into the water. "Tonsina's going in and out, in and out...

07/09/2010

I could post pictures from our trip to Seward, or of Elias stealing magnetic letters from Olive handing them to me and saying: "You want to clean the slobber off of this," and then dropping the letter M on his sister's head.

Or I could write about Elias's back to back public melt-downs, grabbing and squeezing at the neighbors last night when it was time to leave and running away from me, crying: "I want to stay," at the dog park this afternoon, this after hitting me as I carried him under my arm from the lake (and pushed his sister's stroller) as strangers observed.

Oh, I could write about this....!

But instead I want to notice my breathe.

Watch Elias and Olive sleep.

And hold in my heart two families: one who said goodbye to their unborn daughter yesterday and one who greeted their baby via an emergency c-section at 24 weeks today.

07/06/2010

“I’m worried about your state of mind,” Nick said when he
returned home from Spenard Building Supplies, Home Depot, and Lowe’s. “What’s
going on?”

I’ve never been one to hide my emotions, no poker face here.
My eyes tell you how I feel even if I don’t want to reveal what’s inside. And
really, I should be in a good place; we just returned from five days in Seward,
our beach and mountain getaway, where I ate ribs and chocolate chip-peanut
butter-oatmeal cookies, I napped in David’s loft and bush-whacked through the
woods with Olive on her Dad’s back and Elias tromping in front of me up the
trail-less mountain.

(“Let’s keep going up,” Elias said when I called to Nick to
turn around due to the abundant Devil’s Club and vertical slope.Granted, I was supporting Elias from
behind with each step, holding him under his arms, straining my back, but the
terrain motivated my boy instead of intimidating him.)

After five days away, I should be relaxed and all Zen about
this whole parenting two children thing. And yet everything is harder with two
children. Everything from packing to bedtime routines.

“It’s just that they are both so needy in different ways,” I
said to Nick, trying to hold in the tears.

Olive is inching forward now, covering a couple of feet in a
matter of minutes, heading for Elias’s cars, blocks, and magnetic letters on
the fridge.

“What is she doing?” Elias asks me when he’s actually
thinking and not just reacting by pushing her out of his way.

“Olive toppled,” he said this morning after he swatted her
down. As if she just fell on her own. “She toppled!”

He has his rare sweet moments.

“Olive we’re almost at David’s office,” he said yesterday to
his crying sister, leaning towards her car seat, with his strong hands still in
his lap.

His sweet side seems to be holed up somewhere today, stuck
in another dimension where he always says “please” and “thank you” and never
squeezes his sister.

During the soccer game, Elias clocked me in the cheek with
the back of his head when he sat on my lap to snuggle, and the frustration I
felt at my son who cant help his lack of grace sure didn’t help my “state of
mind”.I picked him up and placed
him on the couch next to me so I could walk away, take a breath, and think
about what to say.

“I put my head back and bonked right into Mommy,” Elias
said, in that way of his that wants to turn everything into a joke.

And yet it’s not funny.

I find nothing humorous about his lack of remorse, or the
way he changes the subject to disregard the emotional reaction of others.

“Elias, you can hurt your sister when you push her head like
that.” I said this morning when he grabbed a plastic letter from her mouth with
one hand and pushed the back of her neck with the other.

“But the washer is making a funny noise.”

Huh?!!

Oh to be in his brain; I know I’ve written this before and
I’m sure I’ll write it again but I would sure love to spend some time up there,
to look through his eyes and feel with his mind.

Instead, for my own frayed head, I told Nick, “I think I
just need to write.”

So I drove off to the nearest coffee shop, La Petite
Creperie, with my laptop, in need of a moment alone.

And here I am-- writing about my children.

Why is it that I feel so fried when with them and yet the
moment I escape, all I want to do is reflect on their existence and process
what they mean to me?